Yooka-Laylee Has Gone Gold

After an incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign, the upcoming 3D platform-adventure game Yooka-Laylee has gone gold, well ahead of its release date this spring.

Developer Playtonic announced today that Yooka-Laylee has officially gone gold or, to put it in layman’s terms, development has wrapped on the game. This is excellent news for those who backed the project on Kickstarter, as it means the game will be playable on its confirmed release date of April 11, 2017.

Playtonic made the announcement on the company’s official website, along with a message for backers:

“We couldn’t have reached this moment without the incredible support of our backers, fans, family and friends across the games industry. Thanks again for your unwavering enthusiasm for our studio.”

A game going gold only 21 months after its Kickstarter campaign began is a pretty big deal, considering crowd funded games can often fall into development hell, causing significant delays. Granted, Yooka-Laylee had one delay that pushed its release date from 2016 to the following year, but the trailer that accompanied it tugged at all the right nostalgic threads and all seemed to be forgiven by the masses.

Currently, the campaign is asking backers for their final choices on which platform they’d like to play the game. The Wii U was removed as an option after Nintendo ended the console’s production. Playtonic announced on the Yooka-LayleeKickstarter page that it will continue to “work closely” with Nintendo to attempt to bring the game to the Switch.

“We’d like to thank our many Nintendo fans for their continued patience and understanding while we form our plans: we hope to make your platform of choice a great place to experience Yooka-Laylee in the future!”

Often referred to as the spiritual successor to the beloved Banjo-Kazooie, a series that also had a fondness for musical puns and hyphens, Yooka-Laylee was a bit of a success story already. The game’s Kickstarter campaign met its finance goal in under an hour after it began, which likely boosted the confidence of the development team that hoped to make the game bigger than Banjo-Kazooie.

There were apparently enough fans clamoring for a followup that they were willing to fund the game. Also, the fact that Playtonic Studios is made up of former Rare employees, the studio behind Banjo-Kazooie, probably didn’t hurt.

Now that the game has gone gold, all fans have to do is hold out for a couple more months until they can once again partake in a genre of gaming thought nearly extinct. We here at Game Rant have certainly been hoping that platforming makes a strong return, and Yooka-Laylee could be the game that leads the genre back into popularity.

Yooka-Laylee will release for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on April 11, 2017.